Top 30 Most Influential and Under 30 Young CEOs of 2010

1. Mark Zuckerberg

Company: Facebook

Age: 26

Net Worth: $6.9 Billion

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 at Harvard and since then the social network has grown to over 500 million users. He is the world’s youngest billionaire with Facebook receiving a valuation of over $30 billion in 2010. Zuckerberg has literally changed the way people interact and has broken down social walls faster than ever imagined. Time Magazine named Zuckerberg Person of the Year for 2010 and his company Facebook shows no signs of slowing down.

2. Andrew Mason

Company: Groupon

Age: 30

Net Worth: Groupon Valuation $4.75 Billion

Groupon began in 2008 and has since exploded in growth letting it become the fastest company to ever reach the billion dollar valuation mark. The company is reportedly expecting revenue to be as high as $2 billion in the coming year.  Google made a reported $6 billion dollar buy out offer that was turned down. Andrew has no doubt changed the way people buy things and the way companies market themselves with hundreds of knock-off companies popping up all over the web.

3. Matt Mullenweg

Company: WordPress

Age: 26

Net Worth: $40 Million

If you use WordPress to blog you have Matt to thank for that opportunity. Mullenweg started WordPress in 2003 and then started working on it full-time in 2005. The platform has become one of the most widely used blogging platforms in the world. Matt has made it easier for all of us to publish our thoughts online and his easy to use platform has been the power behind many startup companies in recent years.

4. Ryan Allis & Aaron Houghton

Company: iContact

Age: 26 & 29

Net Worth: 2010 revenue $40 million

Ryan and Aaron started iContact in 2003 to help small businesses better manage their email marketing campaigns. The company started by solely marketing through Google AdWords and has grown to over 63,000 customers today. In August 2010 iContact closed a new round of funding at $40 million.

5. Gurbaksh Chahal

Company: Gwallet

Age: 28

Net Worth: $100 million+

Gurbaksh founded Gwallet in 2009 as a social media currency platform that went on to raise over $12 million later that year. Prior to Gwallet Gurbaksh had already sold two previous ad networks, one for $40 million and the other for $300 million. Today, he is still heading up Gwallet which re-branded to RadiumOne while launching an ad network for social content.



6. Naveen Selvadural

Company: Foursquare

Age: 28

Net Worth: Foursqaure value: $80 million

Naveen founded Foursquare with partner Dennis Crowley to simply help him and his friends explore more things in New York City. Today, Foursquare has become a leader in location based networking helping to spring numerous other startups looking to capture a similar model. While many people are still hesitate to jump on board with Foursquare it has opened new doors to businesses in big cities and provided them a new way to connect with their customers.

7. Pete Cashmore

Company: Mashable.com

Age: 25

Net Worth: N/A

Mashable is one of the world’s largest websites and reports on everything social media related. Cashmore bootstrapped Mashable in 2005 from his home in Scotland. The site does an estimated 30+million monthly pageviews and has surpassed recently acquired Techcrunch (sold to AOL between $25-40million) in terms of size. Revenue is in the millions but that is as much as Cashmore will say about it.

8. Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, Justin Kan and Kyle Vogt

Company: Justin.tv

Age: 27, 27, 27, 25

Net Worth: N/A

Justin.tv allows you to live broadcast anything out over the web. The four founders have created a life-casting platform that handles over 30 million visitors each month with over 50 million hours of video streamed each month. Justin.tv has become the most widely used live video system in existence and with a huge fan base and even major artists on board, it shows no signs of slowing.

9. David Karp

Company: Tumblr

Age: 24

Net Worth: $40 million+ in funding

David started Tumblr in 2007 with his own savings from previously held jobs in the software industry. By early 2010, Tumblr was reportedly getting 15,000 new users per day with over 2 million daily posts  being made. Tumblr has also raised over $40 million in funding from various partners with over $30 million coming in December 2010.   Today, Tumblr boasts over 2.6 billion posts and has an Alexa ranking in the top 100 making it one of the most visited sites on the web.

10. Matt Mickiewicz

Company: Sitepoint.com, 99designs.com and flippa.com

Age: 27

Net Worth: Value of companies $100 million+

Matt launched Sitepoint.com in 1999 to help educate web developers at the age of 14. The site quickly grew into the industry leader and a multi-million dollar company with no outside investment. Since then he founded 99designs which is a leader in crowd-sourced design work and Flippa.com which is a marketplace for selling websites. Matt shows no sign of slowing with a new company launch planned for 2011.

11. Justine Ezarik

Company: iJustine

Age: 26

Net Worth: N/A

Justine Ezarik is the definition of internet celebrity. Justine has over 1.2million Twitter followers, 400,000+ Facebook fans and almost 1 million subscribers to her YouTube channel all from creating viral comic videos online. In 2009 it was estimated her videos had been viewed over 64 million times and she makes over $75,000/year just from YouTube. This celebrity status has also led her to numerous appearances in movies, tv shows, and commercials all while she keeps producing her own videos that brought her to this fame.

12. Cathrine and David Cook

Company: MyYearBook.com

Age: 20 & 22

Net Worth: $20 million+ revenue

Cathrine and David Cook created one of the most popular teen websites in the world with MyYearBook.com. The site boasts over 5 million members and sees almost 20,000 new members join each day. With over $17 million in funding and a passionate user base the two founders look to keep building the platform to serve their community.

13. Trip Adler

Company: Scribd

Age: 26

Net Worth: N/A

Trip founded Scribd to help people share documents online easier and more efficiently. The idea took off and led to over $13 million in funding and a platform that currently hosts and shares tens of millions of documents. Recently Scribd was named by Time Magazine as “One of the 10 Startups That Will Change Your Life”. The timing of Scribd’s product with the publishing industry looking for online solutions could have never been better for the company.

14. Tim O’Shaughnessy and Eddie Frederick

Company: LivingSocial

Age: 28 & 29

Net Worth: $230 million+ in funding

LivingSocial is a competitor of Groupon that offers group buying deals of up to 90% on various social activities. The company has grown to over 85 million users and has recieved over $230 million in funding. The company also hopes to surpass the $100 million mark for revenue this past year.

15. Sean Belnick

Company: BizChair.com

Age: 23

Net Worth: $42 million in revenue – 2008

Sean Belnick started BizChair.com out of his bedroom in 2001 when he was only 14. It started out as a direct selling business for office furniture and has grown to the point where today they now stock most of their products. Sean simply saw how there were a lack of websites dedicated to selling furniture and turned it into a million dollar venture.

16. Garry Tan

Company: Posterous

Age: 29

Net Worth: Over 5 million in funding

Posterous lets you share things like photos, video and text all through email. If you see something you like online you simply email it to posterous and it automatically posts it to a unique posterous URL. Posterous has received over $5 million in funding and is betting that people will want to use email more to share things rather than logging into their separate social accounts.

17. Aaron Levie & Dylan Smith

Company: Box.net

Age: 25  & 24

Net Worth: $30 million in funding

What started as a college project for their business class spiraled into what is now a venture backed business with millions of users. Box.net is backed by almost $30 million in funding, one backer being billionaire Mark Cuban.  The company boasts over 4 million users. Aaron and Dylan found a way to make it easier for anyone to upload and share content across the web and have never looked back.

18. Anthony Volodkin

Company: Hypemachine

Age: 24

Net Worth: N/A

Hypemachine has been called things like “the future of media” by Gawker and named to The Guardians list of “100 essential websites of 2009″. With millions of visitors each month looking for new and interesting music and with the changing of the music industry overall Anthony has put himself in a prime position to capitalize on a growing demand.

19. Sam Lessin

Company: Drop.io

Age: 27

Net Worth: Acquired for around $20 million

Drop.io was a simple file sharing service that in only a few short years had raised almost $10 million in funding. At the end of 2010 the popular service was acquired by Facebook where Sam Lessin and his team were brought on board to help Facebook product development.

20. Alexander Levin

Company: ImageShack

Age: 26

Net Worth: $50 million+

ImageShack is a free image hosting and sharing service. Alexander founded the company in 2003 and has grown it today to a top 100 website on Alexa. While growth has slowed in recent years ImageShack dominated the industry in the mid 2000′s and is still an industry leader.

21. Eric Koger & Susan Gregg Koger

Company: Modcloth

Age: 26 & 25

Net Worth: $15 million+ revenue

An online clothing retailer that was launched in 2002 and has almost $20 million in funding. Modcloth does alright for itself with $15 million+ in revenue and over 150 employees. With the funding received this past year and the company now being profitable Modcloth is poised to grow even faster in the upcoming years.

22. Aodhan Cullen

Company: Statcounter

Age: 28

Net Worth: N/A

Aodhan started statcounter in 1999 to help websites track how many people visited their sites. The company exploded throughout the dot com boom and as of 2008 had surpassed 2 million members. Statcounter in ranked in the top 200 on Alexa and despite increasing competition is still widely used.

23. Tristan Harris, Can Sar, and Jesse Young

Company: Apture

Age: 26, 26, 25

Net Worth: N/A

Apture is a multimedia linking company that works with content publishers online. Over 10,000 blogs use the service along with high profile clients like The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and The New York Times. The company has been backed by over $4 million and is constantly experimenting with new ways to develop and deliver media online.

24. Dan Yue, Chris Wang, Ling Xiao

Company: Playdom

Age: 26, 26, 28

Net Worth: $763 million acquisition

Playdom is a leader in social networking gaming boasting over 400 employees and over $50 million in revenue in 2009. The company was purchased by Disney in 2010 for up to $763 million depending on what growth numbers are met in coming years.

25. Ben Lerer

Company: Thrillist

Age: 29

Net Worth: N/A

Thrillist is a newsletter that caters to men’s lifestyle in 17 cities in the U.S. and U.K. The newsletter has over 2 million subscribers and has a revenue of over $10 million a year. The newsletter is still expanding and more local markets are on tap for 2011.

26. Emily Olson, Rob LaFave, and Nik Bauman

Company: Foodzie.com

Age: 26, 27, 26

Net Worth: N/A

Foodzie is a marketplace to find and buy food directly from artisan food growers. The company has received over $1 million in funding and is in a prime marketplace as more people look to buy organic and local. Foodzie helps the small food growers by providing a marketplace but also by handling credit cards, shipping labels and tax calculations.

27. Nick Friedman & Omar Soliman

Company: C0llege Hunks Hauling Junk

Age: 26

Net Worth: N/A

Nick and Omar started a franchise of junk collection and removal from a summer business they had started in 2002. A way to earn some summer income during college turned into a company that has over 30 franchises, over 50 trucks and 100 employees across the country.

28. Daniel Ek

Company: Spotify

Age: 27

Net Worth: $80 million+ funding

While not currently offered in the U.S., Spotify is a U.K. based music streaming service. The service allows users to listen to any track with almost no delay and offers ad free services to listeners. The company has raised over $80 million in funding and boasts over 10 million users.

29. Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia,  and Nathan Blecharczyk

Company: AirBnB

Age: 28, 28, 27

Net Worth: N/A

AirBnB is an online marketplace that lets people list, discover and book unique places to stay. There are over 50,000 listings in over 8,000 cities around the world. The company also has secured over $7 million in funding as it looks to make it even easier for people to market their open spaces to people across the world.

30. Amos Winbush III

Company: Cybersynchs

Age: 26

Net Worth: N/A

Amos’s company synchs smart-phones with a secure database online so users can pull and store information from their devices. The company returned over $5 million in revenue last year and the popularity is growing as corporations are using the system to pull information from mobile workers.

Credits to W.Idea